There's something I find depressing about the response to my post on Russell Brand - that it has received far more attention than almost all my other posts even though many of those are on what I'd regard as more important matters.

Now I know that writing about your blog traffic is, to paraphrase Lyndon Johnson, like pissing down your leg: it seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else. But bear with me, because I fear that this pattern illustrates (at least) three depressing facets of our political life. (I might be committing the journalist's fallacy of drawing general inferences from particular data here, but I'll risk it.)

One is tribalism. As I've said before, people aren't really interested in politics in the sense of how our public realm should be governed. Instead, their interest in politics is merely tribal; they want to cheer their own tribe whilst booing the other. Attitudes to Russell seem unduly influenced by whether one regards him as one of us or one of them.

A second is that we live in a celebocracy. People want to read about celebrities; my post on Owen Jones also got disproportionate traffic. As Matt says, the left is at least as guilty here as the right. There's a long and largely inglorious history of leftists looking for heroes who in fact are deeply flawed.

Thirdly, people take their agenda from the media; I've often noticed higher than usual traffic when I blog about "newsworthy" matters.

Now, I don't say all this merely to deplore such trends. I'll confess to my share of tribalism and celeb-interest too: I spend more time than I should on Popbitch and the Mail's sidebar of shame.

Instead, my concern is that these tendencies, if unchecked, serve a reactionary purpose. The media-celeb-tribalism agenda serves as an Overton window, allowing light to shine on some issues but not others. But it's those other, endarkened, issues that truly bring into question the desireability of our existing order. My recent posts on social mobility, intellectual diversity, attitudes towards inequality and the constraints upon leadership are more important than my posts on Brand and Jones, and have more radical implications too. But because they fell outside the Overton window they were (relatively) neglected.

If we had a political culture that was seriously interested in social change, it would pay less attention to Russell Brand and much more to the Smith Institute report (pdf) on working conditions and Stuart White's piece on liberal responses to inequality - to take two very recent examples. But it doesn't. And that is an obstacle to egalitarian change.

I say all this not to expect you to give a damn about my blog's traffic - I don't, so why should you? - but to raise a question. It's a cliche to complain about politicians. But could it be that many of the problems with our politics lie not just with their inadequacies, but rather in the fact that even those voters who claim to be interested in politics have a distorted sense of what's important?

That poem by Bertolt Brecht is a terrible cliche, but it hints at some truth.